


Mycelium; or the tragedy of want

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1940s, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Blackmail, Cliques, Dark, Dark Academia, Dom/sub Undertones, Drinking, Ethics, Exhibitionism, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Murder, Law, Love, M/M, Manipulative Tom Riddle, Minor Violence, Morally Grey Harry Potter, Obsession, Philosophy, Postgraduate Student Tom Riddle, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Power Play, Professor Harry Potter, Regret, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Teacher-Student Relationship, Twisted love, Unhealthy Relationships, Voyeurism, as in Harry is 32 and Tom is 23
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:53:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25905397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Harry had regrets—a lot of regrets—but the biggest was undeniably getting involved with Tom, his grad student.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Comments: 13
Kudos: 96





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank Purpleradiance for reminding me that fanfiction is for writing what I want and enjoying it, so here is the most ridiculous, self-indulgent, and probably pretentious, thing I've written in a long time. 
> 
> I'd also like to thank RuhRo7 for reminding me that my writing is not always as bad as I think it might be.

Regret was a cruel creature; it ate away at you, chewing on your soul until the universe became so small and so bitter that you could taste it on the back of your throat. But that did not stop Harry from having regrets, some were minor—that sweater he wished he’d bought, the friends he wished he’d seen one more time, the conversations he’d wished he’d had—others were all-consuming. But his biggest regret of all was undeniably getting enmeshed in the barbed-wire world of Tom Riddle. 

If someone had told Harry when he took the prestigious job at Hogwarts that it would be his moral downfall, he would have laughed at them. He would have said that something as pretentious as that belonged in stories for apathetic youths searching their empty lives for something soulful, or the gossip columns of sensational magazines; it certainly did not belong in the walls of a respectable institution, or directed at him, now a respectable professor. 

And yet, lying here in bed with all the lights out, Harry could see the moral vacuum that his life had become. There were spaces shaped like monsters eating up his soul, spreading wide and stretching him from the inside out; just this endless void, extending out in front of him—his entire life elongated and the moment that it all went rotten, glowing red and hot like the inner loop of Tom’s iris.

Because there was a pinpointable moment when his world had been irreparably damaged—cracked right down to the core—and that was the moment Tom Riddle entered it. Since the very beginning of their existences, they had been on a collision course, and every second of every day was nothing more than a countdown to the moment they would meet. That fated moment that Harry’s respectability—his very decency—was split at the heart. Fractured, never to be remade. 

Harry rolled onto his side and stared at the smoothed down shoulder blades of the man lying beside him; the one for whom he had risked it all—his job, his future, his freedom—but who’d never quite lived up to the expectations of all Harry’s hopeless dreams. For a feeling, that the world called love, but Harry called agony, he’d followed a man whose soul was white with rot to the end of the moral universe, and now he stood at the apex, wondering whether it was all worth it. 

To be honest, he doubted it. 

Being shattered into a hundred-thousand pieces sounded so romantic but experiencing it was the most painful thing he had ever endured; having to watch as someone you loved peeled off their layers, like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon, and revealed their putrefied soul was horrifying. Though not nearly as appalling as feeling the man you loved putting his hands on your throat when you knew they were the hands of a murderer. It was sickening, and yet, Harry was still here. 

Whatever Tom had done, Harry was still lying here beside him, blanketed by the dark and soothed by the sounds of Tom’s breathing and the gentle shifts of his back, and that was enough to convince Harry that it was all for love in the end. The hideous things he’d done in his transmutation from decency to depravation, was done in the name of grotesque love—that mighty force that at its zenith was so consuming it ate him up and burned him out. 

And he’d do it all again. 

Whatever monster love had made him into, and however much it writhed within his soul, there were things he would do for Tom that no man should ever say out loud. But that was the torment of love, wasn’t it? Being torn up, ripped apart, splintered; having your morality twisted beyond recognition because you were no longer the most important thing in your life. 

Harry swallowed and leaned in closer to rest his forehead on the back of Tom’s neck—he was in too deep to listen to the howling regrets in his heart anymore. And all he had to explain the unspeakable things he’d done, was a weak, four-letter, justification that left chemical burns on the back of his throat. So yes, Harry regretted falling in love with an idea; with a false man who had stitched himself an academic suit and emblazoned it with mystery and charm. The man that Harry had fallen for didn’t exist; Tom was just one of those illusions that dissolve like the seam foam as soon as someone touches them. 

So yes again, Harry regretted, more than anything in the world, getting involved with Tom Riddle, but for want of things he didn’t have—a status that he had craved—he had done it anyway, and now he had to live with the consequences of his foolishness.


	2. Six months earlier

To be offered a position at Hogwarts to teach and research and mentor had been Harry’s dream since the first moment that he stepped under the arches and wandered through the great corridors. It wasn’t only that it was a prestigious institution that wanted _him_ to be the youngest professor they had ever had, but rather the fact that Harry himself had been an undergraduate there nearly ten years ago now and returning had felt like a ritual of coming home. He’d walked through the entrance gate and through the gardens, passing by every same, worn-faced statue, and stepping under every archway just as he had done before, but now he held greater confidence—a purpose—in being here; he would impart knowledge and educate young, inquisitive, minds; nurturing a student’s potential and sculpting them into the best version of their academic selves.

His arrival had been marked by nothing more than a solo entrance through empty corridors and the briefest of announcements, met with a muted but polite applause, on the first day of term, and yet, Harry had a prophetic feeling of _belonging_ , as though this was _it_ —he had arrived at the place that the universe had wanted him to be—and now there was nothing between him and achieving that quiet goal of a contented life. 

A year and a half later, he was still there, still working and teaching in one of the four colleges of the university—the very same one that he had studied and been taught in when he was here—though now talk of his unprecedented arrival and even his presence had stopped, for there were new rumours of brilliance snaking their way through the corridors; speculations of new ideas, of new talent, of new blood—even if it took the form of the old. 

Such talk was hardly surprising, after all, amongst any student body, there was always a couple or more students who stood out—a faction the demarcated itself from the rest through individuality, or talent, or sometimes merely their families. That type of student was, unfortunately, not uncommon and usually had a sense of self-entitlement which prevented them from interacting with anyone as vulgar and ill-mannered as the lower classes—it was those _cliques_ that were distasteful. Even if, as Harry would be the first to admit, a large concentration of those types of students ended up in his college, they were still distasteful as decay, and much like a rot, they thrived in the correct conditions and, again, unfortunately, the pervading class and whiteness and elitism of Slytherin nurtured such rot as loam nurtures fungus. 

Nonetheless, most of the coteries that established themselves—even within Slytherin—were entirely normal; _unworthy_ Harry would be inclined to think, but not to say, of the rumours that surrounded them. However, some people were genuinely something special. 

One such group—defined simply by their academic prowess—had formed a year into Harry tenure and consisted of five postgraduate students: Riddle, Malfoy, Lestrange, Mulciber and Rosier, whose research was all vaguely focussed around the legal system and its philosophical origins. They were all charming, attractive, people and four of them had more figures to their inheritance than Harry cared to remember—heirs and heiresses to vast family fortunes whose lineages could be traced back to the twelfth century. 

Their money, or rather, the abstract concept of it, appeared to be what fuelled much of their popularity and they were the most coveted of company, even if they preferred their own insular little existence with just the five of them against the world. When they’d first started to distinguish themselves from the rest of the student body, Harry had watched them from across the room as they studied together in the library, and from the high windows of the second floor as the five of them lay in the autumn sun. He’d continued to watch them as winter set in and the fog rolled across the grounds of the university, chilling the stone and making much of the buildings feel damp. But that had not put those five off, and Harry saw them often crowded together on bleak frosted benches, their shoulders knocking together and highbrow conversation spilling from their mouths. 

However, Harry would be lying if he said that he watched all of them equally—really, he watched four of them absently and the fifth ardently; he’d like to say that that was because the fifth—Riddle—was, obviously, the leader and, not to mention, _his_ research student and so, of course, he had more of an interest in him. But that would be the fatal lie that led to the unravelling of the world. 

As much as Harry was loath to admit it, it was an undeniable fact that he didn’t just watch Riddle because he tutored him. Rather, Harry watched him because Riddle had all the characteristics of what society deems to be a remarkable person—masculinity, youth, intelligence, the sort of good looks that made everyone turn their heads—and, perhaps with the sight of him, there were fleeting emotions that snaked down Harry’s throat, too quick to be identified, but always leaving behind a sticky sickness clinging to the walls of his stomach. 

For it was indisputable that, at over thirty, the burning vigour of youth was fading from Harry but was not yet being replaced with the assurance of age, and though his tenure was secure, he was yet to publish that ground-breaking text. The one that would cement his name into the walls of this institution and quietly preserve himself in history—an example to all that _anyone_ could make it. Likewise, whilst Harry knew his physical appearance was nothing to fret over, he couldn’t help but watch the mirror morning after morning, and see the young visage be swallowed by the mouth of maturity; he was not an old man yet by any means, but nor was he a young one anymore, and the itching need to accomplish… something was gnawing at the corners of his brain. 

_They_ had no such qualms for they were the pinnacle of existence, the fruit that everyone wanted a piece of, and knowing that made the spaces between Harry's ribs burn. Maybe, it was jealousy—enough academics fell victim to the talent of their students and only then, in the face of genuine genius, did they become aware of their mortifying inadequacy. Or, maybe it was envy, that sad desire to relive days that had long since passed; a nostalgia for a world that was never really his; one of money and immediate acceptance. Those five were not struck down by the perception of insufficiency, given, their one shared trait was being utterly convinced of their pre-ordained abilities, and perhaps it was this that brought them together: their distinct belief in their talents. An immense confidence that they belonged here—just as Harry did—and that they deserved to be here purely because of who they were—unlike Harry, who was here on merit. 

But that intent of purpose was their only commonality, the rest was a mere coincidence of wants that happened to bloom a friendship. 

From what Harry had learnt over the last eight months or so, they could be differentiated, for instance, Malfoy had entirely too much money to be pursuing a postgraduate degree, and frankly, it showed in his work ethic—he was never where he should be and his thesis chapters, if they were delivered at all, were always delivered in late. Though, easily the most frustrating thing about Malfoy was that he had a great aptitude for the discipline; this extraordinary capacity for delineating precise problems, unfortunately, paired with a complete disinterest for solving them. But he made up for his unacademic attitude by being sickly sweet to anyone and everyone, and he had a certain talent for bribing people to start seeing things from his point of view—thus making subornation his only means of problem-solving. Usually, it worked too, and there was an unofficial ‘look the other way’ policy surrounding Malfoy and his unsolicited gift giving. 

However, if Malfoy was sickly-sweet in character, then Lestrange was bittersweet, with his pathological need to be right and his infinite propensity for arguing about it, he could be unbearable. But he did, at least, turn his papers in on time, even if they were handwritten instead of typed; Harry had seen Lestrange’s handwriting and could confirm it wasn’t something to be admired. There were too many patrician loops and highborn curls for it to be distinguishable to anyone remotely ‘common.’ Some brave professors had had words about it, but they had eventually given up when every time a deadline came, the paper was always submitted written in Lestrange’s aristocratic scrawl. 

Rosier was altogether a different creature; she _always_ typed and _always_ had a final cutting remark laying in wait on the tip of her pink serrated tongue. She was also the most impassioned—almost fanatically so—about her research, the only problem with that was her output was strictly on _her_ terms; deadlines meant nothing to Rosier. And anyone who tried to remind her of the intrinsic advantages of working to a schedule was snappily reminded that Rome was not, in fact, built in a day. Harry had heard that line of argument play out more times than he’d cared to remember, mostly in the library when some doddery, old, fool decided to challenge Rosier’s surety, by suggesting that whilst Rome was not built in a day, it _was_ built using a coherent timetable—those arguments didn’t tend to end well for the idiot that engaged in them.

On the other end of the argumentative spectrum was Mulciber, who was a woman concerned with high-quality opinions and low-quality morals and, of all of them, she probably had the most chance of actually making it in academia. Without exception, she delivered her papers on time, even if they were, by all accounts, a little long, and she always took feedback without raising the roof. That being said, there was a ruthlessness about her that less-wise individuals had called unfeminine; they had learnt the hard way that such underestimations were not to be made, and now they were treated with a distinct disdain whenever Mulciber was forced to interact with them. Out of the four, she was the one that Harry most liked thanks to that unending practicality and straightforwardness, even if she sometimes expressed her view a tad… bluntly. 

That only left Riddle, and he made the other’s gemstone personas look like nothing more than coloured glass veneers. Somehow, every action they did, Tom could do better. And though he didn’t have that same aristocratic enunciation to his words or the same practised poise that had been learned in the halls of a public school. He didn’t make classic conversation or good small talk, but he still had a charm about him that dragged every towards him like a gravitational pull. It was obvious that he was unrefined—a particularly rough around the edges—but even in that state he was their equal and, in that respect, Tom rather reminded Harry of himself, Or, maybe, Tom was what he _could_ have been if he too had been accepted into the rich, undulating ranks of wealth when he was an undergraduate. 

However, there was also something else about Tom’s presence that made the pit of Harry’s stomach ache, as though there was something _alive_ inside him, writhing around and making a sickness rub his throat raw because he _shouldn’t_ feel this was about a _student_. There was no reasonable excuse to be staring at Tom’s teeth as they rested on his lip when he was writing a paper, or, admiring that divine spark of intellectuality that smouldered at his very core, or even wanting to spend time just listening to everything he said because Tom had this way with words, where he wrapped them around his fingers like summer weeds. 

All that could be said was that these feelings were _wrong_ ; profoundly and aberrantly wrong, and to be having such thoughts made Harry’s insides—his brain, his heart, his very soul—just as wrong. To admit that he was… charmed by, captivated with—dare he say— _attracted to_ his student was an acute violation of everything Harry had ever stood for, and, had another professor shared the idea with him in confidence, he would have been horrified. But, despite, the potential, brutal, consequences of such thoughts, Harry still found himself staring—tragically possessed by the image of a young man on the cusp of academic brilliance because Tom _was_ brilliant—hideously brilliant.

They all were and perhaps that was the problem: a combination of too much talent and too much money that would tear them apart like a star that becomes too powerful to sustain itself. 

It was such thoughts as those that made Harry watch them, intent to see them past the point of combustion and onto maturity, and such attention was likely what magnetised them towards him—flocking like birds to the birdfeeder. Well, that and their understandable anxiousness to be away from the antediluvian ramblings of professors who thought the discipline of philosophy was an unquestionable science, and that women shouldn’t have been allowed into academia. Perhaps in his moments of musing, Harry would like to think, they thought of him as an archetype to be imitated—a man who had made it—and thus every request to be in his presence was merely an opportunity for them to perfect their emulation. Though, to be perfectly frank, their arrival and act of mimicry tended to mark the imminent death of productivity for all involved. 

Although, currently, he and Tom had managed an hour and a half of a class without being interrupted, though that might have had more to do with the fact they were seated up in Harry’s office on the third floor, and Rosier had a pathological disinclination from using the stairs. But barring Rosier’s aversions to it, it had been quite the gift to get this office—the one he remembered spending hours in when he was younger, and, even now, Harry spent far too long sitting up on the mezzanine that caught the afternoon sun, staring out at the lake and feeling like this was exactly where he was meant to be. 

Tom must have felt a similar way because he spent far more time in here than any other student Harry had ever had; often, he wasn’t even working. He just sat by the window, admiring the view, or walking around the room, running his fingers over all the books that lined the walls and asking Harry increasingly obscure questions; once, Harry’s had caught Tom watching _him_ as he graded papers. Whenever he thought about that memory, harry couldn’t help the faint heating creeping over his cheeks and the itching that spread from the tips of his fingers to the base of his palm—it was just so _thrilling_ being looked at like he was something to be treasured. 

There was a similar itching in Harry’s palms now, as he and Tom were on the lower level of his office, both sitting at the desk and going over one of Tom’s research papers. It wasn’t much, just a crawling sensation as though tiny pins were pricking him from the inside, and it was only made worse by the warmth of Tom’s fingers that were so close to Harry’s hand as he wrote down the last of Harry’s recommendations.

It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed it, and though he _did_ try not to, Harry couldn’t help but be intensely _aware_ of every action Tom engaged in, from the slight tilt of his wrist when he let his pen drop onto the desk with the finality of a man whose work is completed, to the slow, soothing, way he breathed when he concentrating. To anyone else, it would have meant nothing, but Harry watched and something in him yearned to reach out and wrap his fingers around Tom’s wrist, or to lean into Tom’s space and listen to him talk about anything and everything, whilst his eyes sparked and the corners of his mouth turned up into a smile that was soft in the middle and sharp at the edge.

Maybe that was why Harry opened his mouth when he didn’t strictly need to. “Did you get a chance to read that paper I recommended?” he asked. 

“You mean the Marx?” Tom said, leaning languidly back in his chair, his heels scraping over the floor and his face tilting up to the ceiling in the fashion of all young men who think they have all the time in the world. Harry tried not to watch him, he did, but it was nigh-on impossible when the sun was slamming so violently into the side of Tom’s face, painting a plain of gold that stretched the length of his left side, whilst the right remained submerged in bronze shadows.  
“Because I read that,” Tom continued, his voice cutting through the silence and his tongue wetting his lips as he spoke. 

“And…” Harry said, swallowing down all the inappropriate comparisons that were layered thick across his tongue; the visions of an Adonis or whatever other subjects those poets of old spoke of—that great temptation that existed on the tip of men’s tongues; the Snark they spent their lives hunting but never quite getting between their fingers. “…What did you think?”

“Overrated, quite frankly,” Tom said, lazily inclining his head to look at Harry properly, “I mean structural exploitation has its place, of course, it does,” he continued, “but Marx fetishizes it at the expense of the intrapersonal element, and that’s a pretty fundamental oversight, don’t you think?”

“It’s not about what I think.”

“Isn’t it?” said Tom, his chin raised and the colour of his eyes changing with the slinking of the shadows, “I thought that’s why I was here—to listen to your opinions and regurgitate it all back at you in a paper you think is the holy grail.”

Harry shifted himself closer and watched the way Tom’s eyes dipped over him; his palms getting hot and dryness powdering the inside of his mouth. “Do you really think so little of higher education?” he said matching Tom’s provocative tone, “that you are convinced it’s all one vast, elitist sham?”

Tom smiled, that tongue of his pressed between his teeth, “it all seems pretty elitist to me,” he said, “but more importantly, do you _really_ think so much of your student that my words become infallible, simply because they are spoken by me?” As he spoke, Tom slid his chair just that little bit closer, easing out the spaces between them and making the light against the back wall narrow. The sound of the chair was obscene. The scraping seeming to have monumental meaning and unfathomable consequences beyond the simple act that it was, and Harry had to wonder what would happen if the power structure that lay unspoken in the air, simply dissolved away and they were sitting here as men of equal standing. 

But Harry merely swallowed down those considerations and played at being casual, his hand resting on the table, rolling Tom’s pen between under his palm—it was still warm from where he’d held it. “The only infallible statements I ever hear,” Harry said, “are the ones that come from your mouth.” As soon as the words left his tongue, they felt too intimate to be shared—too _important_ —as though their lettering had interwoven itself with his soul and by speaking them, he was stringing himself out for all to see. 

“So, I’m infallible, am I?” Tom said, the smile creeping further over his features and infecting them as insidiously as dry rot and didn’t that make a wonder of his face? The sun skimming over the angle of his cheekbone and hooking itself into the corner of his mouth; it made him gleam like the precious stones that his wealthier contemporaries wore. And still, he looked at Harry like he was staring at his insides of his soul and dredging up its contents for closer examination; like Harry was something special to be kept in those precious boxes and coveted. 

“I’d be careful of using that sort of language if I were you, Professor,” Tom said, low and sweet as honey, “or people are going to think you’re playing favourites.”

Without meaning to, Harry dipped his head and smiled to himself. It was wrong, he knew it was, but he _did_ have a favourite, but then again, so did everyone else and it was all the same student—Tom was everyone’s favourite and he knew. They all just couldn’t help it.

“As enjoyable as it is talking to you about favouritism, Riddle,” he said, his name smarting off his tongue as though the letters themselves had the power to cut into his muscles and make him bleed, “I think I actually asked you about Marx.”

“And I,” Tom said, leaning close with one, pointed, elbow resting on the desk and his palm cupping his cheek and the shadows flourishing across his skin in rich, rusted, blooms, “suggested to you, that his fetishisation of the structural factors of exploitation at the expense of the intrapersonal components, negates his claim of oppression, class-based or otherwise, because by overlooking them, he ignores the potential for the allegedly exploited party to consent because genuine consent contradicts oppression.” Tom paused, though the length and depth of it implied he didn’t intend to talk again, and smiled at Harry, “so, with that out the way,” he said, “can we talk about your favouritism, professor?”

“Not when I—” Harry began, but before he could continue, he was interrupted by the sound of the door, not being knocked, but rather being opened, which could only mean one particular person had decided to grace them with his presence. Malfoy: the one man Harry had met, who seemed to be entirely aware of social etiquette, but simply assumed it didn’t apply to him because they were, in his words, ‘ _such_ an inconvenience.’ 

Both Harry and Tom turned back towards the door in time to witness Malfoy wandering leisurely in, followed by the usual coterie: Rosier second, then Mulciber, then Lestrange; all of them meandering, lost and a little putout like circus elephants searching the ring for their trainer. Together they looked quite the curiosity, a mismatch of individuals whose personalities had melded together more out of inevitability than the immediate, intense, desire for friendship. But, regardless of motivation, they had fused themselves until their sweet, academic world was almost hermetically sealed with, only a few, privy to the combination that could unlock their single, sleek, unit of existence and string them out as individuals. 

“Sorry, can I help you?” Harry asked, watching, fairly helplessly, as they assumed their usual positions of interruption; the ones that suggested there was really no point continuing to work because they would only serve as a distraction. The whole charade was frankly reminiscent of a hoard of cats descending upon a room where the occupant had declared their intent to be focussed—they can only go so long before the yowling by the door, or the shaking of the bookcase or the scratching on the carpet drives them to distraction and the focus is lost. 

“Oh, definitely,” Malfoy said, his limbs sprawling more than any trained contortionist as he spread himself over one of the leather armchairs directly behind Tom’s chair.  
“You of all people, Potter,” he continued, “could have warned me how nauseating first-years were, if someone had had the decency to tell me, I would never have volunteered to instruct them.”  
There were several audible sighs—like they had all been party to this conversation several times before—but only Rosier voiced an opinion on the matter. 

“I do believe—for the record,” she said, “that you didn’t actually ‘volunteer’ per se, rather you were compelled when you didn’t deliver that outline on time.”

“Mere details,” Malfoy replied with a dismissive wave of his hand, as though that put the entire matter to rest, “the point is that _I_ just had to waste my time educating some witless first-years.”  
The casual cruelty of the statement hung in the air and maybe Harry should have defended the legitimacy of first-year ignorance given they were, after all, first-years and little could be expected of anyone that young. 

But he didn’t because, at that moment, Tom turned to him with those honey-sheened eyes and grinned in the shared disbelief that of all the people here, this was the one he’d managed to befriend. It was hideous that a mere smile could set an inferno ablaze between Harry’s ribs, the heat consuming his heat like a ravenous monster was eating him from the inside out, just as the smoke began to burn at his lungs. It was just a smile. But it contained a cosmos in every curve and in the stillness of a moment that seemed to last forever, Harry knew that somehow that smile would be the end of his him. 

Its curves and arches and soft pink shapes would crush him, and those pale teeth would chew him up and it was such stark thing to realise. Like having a fist clenched around his throat, Harry knew with absolute certainty that Tom would somehow leave marks deep in his psyche and in his heart that no amount of scrubbing with water, or soap, or bleach would ever get out. 

“Were they entirely gormless?” Mulciber asked, her husky tone matching the heaviness of the sun, but the question opening up the conversation and forcing Harry out of his head. As she spoke, she leaned further into one of the bookcases and continued to thumb through a couple of the volumes that she’d been hankering Harry to let her borrow. 

“Oh, utterly,” replied Malfoy, delighted that someone had taken the bait, “they’ll never do well.” 

“Shame; I can’t imagine how sad it must be for them to be so trite,” she said, sliding a large red volume off the shelf and waving it at Harry, “can I have this one?”

Harry sighed, his hand coming, almost involuntarily, up to his brow—this was the third interruption this week and he did technically have a job to do that didn’t involve placating their unstimulated minds.  
“Did you—I don’t know—happen to realise that you’re interrupting us?” Harry said, trying his best to sound authoritative, even with four pairs of entirely disbelieving eyes stared at him, unblinking, and Tom gave him another one of those diamond smiles he reserved for his favourites—the ones that glittered and bared his heart to the world. 

“ _Please_ ,” Malfoy said, shifting around to get comfier in the chair, “you’ve been monopolising Riddle’s attention for _aeons_ , it’s only fair we should get a taste of him too, given he’s supposed to be our friend and all.”

Harry just looked at him, focussing on his face and not the horrendous sprawl of limbs, from his legs dangling precariously over the arm of the chair, and his fingertips scraping the wood of the floor and raised a critical eyebrow. “So that’s all you want? A taste of him?” he said, pausing for a moment to savour how obscene such a sentence sounded on his lips, before adding, “because I never had you down as a cannibal, Malfoy.”

Across the room, Rosier laughed from where she had sat on the sofa, her heels up on the seat and denting the leather and her eyes fixed to an apparent chip on her red painted nails. “Don’t be silly,” she said, “we’d all be cannibals for the sake of Riddle.” The way she said it was assertive as though it were an absolute certainty that everyone who met Tom wanted to have a piece of him to take away and call their own.  
“You should know that, Potter,” she continued as she examined her nails, before raising her eyes slowly and as dramatically as she could, “in fact,” she said, “I bet it’s all you and the other tutors talk about in that… inner sanctum of yours—how unbearably scrumptious he is.”

For ten entirely too long seconds, Harry thought she might have he worked out where his thoughts wandered to when he had a moment to himself, or maybe she’d seen the way his eyes lingered a moment too long on Tom’s face, and how he couldn’t help but touch at Tom’s shoulder when they met in the corridor, all professional and strictly platonic on the surface but clumsy and hankering underneath. But, before he could string a sentence together that might have constituted itself as a vaguely appropriate to answer to those unspoken accusations, Rosier was laughing again, her head dropping right back against the lip of the sofa and mussing up her hair. 

“Don’t look so scandalised,” she said, the tinges of laughter still colouring every syllable, “I’m only tussling with you—I bet you spend a good portion of your time talking about _all_ of us.”

Harry swallowed, a sickness spreading down his throat and swirling up the contents of his stomach. “I think you overestimate your importance, Rosier,” he said, slowly and calmly and completely ignoring the fact that every conversation he had with anyone was always linked, sometimes tenuously, sometimes intimately, with _them_ and their horridly interesting lives. 

“Au contraire,” Rosier retorted, apparently seeing all of this as some fun little game to entertain herself with while the years passed, instead of the perverse dealings of the heart that it was, and always with that pretty little smile of hers that felt like a papercut against Harry skin, “you, Potter, underestimate my importance in the universe.”

“Sure, I do,” he said—agreeing because this was not a conversation that he was going to win. “But, now, can any of you tell me if you did _actually_ have a reason for interrupting me this time?” Harry asked, scanning each of their faces for a crack of weakness that might reveal their intentions—though, they rarely needed a reason to barge in and set upon his space like crows on carrion. In that slow silence, interrupted only by the beams of the sun and people avoiding his eyes, Harry spoke again. 

“Well?” he said, addressing the room at large, “any explanations?”

Lestrange was the only one to open his mouth, hardly a surprise given he was never too far from a conflict, be it physical or merely academic. “Malfoy finished a five-page paper,” he said from where he was standing by the door, one foot preventing it from being opened, “and we felt like we should celebrate such a momentous achievement,” Lestrange continued, his features setting themselves to an entirely impish mould “after all, I doubt it’ll happen again any time soon.”

“Oh, fuck you,” said Malfoy immediately as he scrambled to raise himself onto his elbows just to point his finger at Lestrange like some medieval witch-accuser. “That’s—that’s, what’s it called?” he said, even in his wide-eyed agitation looking towards Tom for an answer. “Slander!” he announced, “that is slander of the highest order and it will _not_ be tolerated in this college.”

“Indeed,” said Mulciber, “defamation is such an unsightly business.” She glanced over at Lestrange with the tip of her tongue pushed between her teeth and her eyes sparkling, “especially when we _all_ know he only finished three pages of that paper.”

“Filthy mudslingers, all of you,” Malfoy said, louder than before as he sat up properly to face them all, though he looked remarkably like one of those overly feisty rabbits trying to delay its inevitable demise between the teeth of a fox. “I’ll have you know,” he continued, “the preface is _not_ important.”

“And nor is the conclusion, apparently,” said Lestrange.

For just one, short, moment there was silence and then everyone was lost in the chaos of debating with each other the exact merits of the conclusions and the preface, the introduction and the afterword. Harry sighed and gazed at the ceiling. It wasn’t that their conversations were entirely without merit, or even that Harry didn’t enjoy them; it was merely that they seemed to insist on having these loud disputes in his vicinity whilst he was trying to work

Tom must have sensed the mild frustration emanating from him for he turned towards Harry. The almond warmth of the sun catching on the corner of his mouth as he maintained that cool, collected appearance that those who stay on the sidelines of arguments always seem to possess. In the eight months or so of knowing him, Harry had never seen Tom irritated or even agitated, instead, he lived in this perpetual detachment from much of the world around him, as though he had seen its underbelly and was disgusted with the things that writhed there. 

“I believe the professor asked you a question,” Tom said, barely raising his tone, but the distinct sound of his voice cutting through all the noise and ringing out like the call for a toast at a bustling dinner party. “I presume you have the courtesy to answer it?”

“Of course, Riddle,” said Malfoy, swallowing down whatever posh insult had been on the tip of his tongue and holding Tom’s gaze for a fraction too long. He turned to Harry and swallowed again, “we want you to come to drinks tonight,” he said, the weight of the suggestion heavy in his mouth and flopping off his tongue inelegantly, “after all, we do so love having your company, Potter.”

“Can I ask why?” Harry said, leaning comfortably back in his chair, now that order had been restored, to watch the group as they glanced at each other, each waiting for the other to form a viable justification. “Because, right now, it sounds like you want to butter me up before announcing something horrible.”

“Would we do that to you?” said Rosier 

Harry gave her a look and it was all that was needed for the room to descend into another debate, this time on whether they did so such a thing, and if they did, did it cause harm to others? At first glance, it seemed an innocuous question and Harry tried to follow the two sides—on fronted by Lestrange and the other by Mulciber—but their voices were lapping over one another and folding into each other like complicated stitching until it was a cavern of noise echoing back at him.

It was against the background of that disturbance that Tom moved his chair again, shifting himself closer to Harry. Though none of the others noticed it, Harry was painfully aware of the scratching of the chair legs on the floor—probably leaving scuff marks—and the warmth of Tom’s knee as it bumped against his own. 

“Were you part of this plot?” Harry said, without turning to face him. 

“If I said I wasn’t, would you believe me?”

“No,” he said genuinely because there was rarely a scheme involving that lot that Tom hadn’t either been directly involved in or, at the bare minimum, sanctioned. 

That response didn’t please Tom as he paused and sat back against the wooden slats of the chair, but also to the left so that he was as close to Harry as possible whilst still being in his seat. “Then I’ll save my protests of innocence for another time,” he said, though there was no bitterness in his tone, only a matter-of-fact acceptance. 

They were quiet for a while, watching the near-chaos unfold before them—Malfoy making accusations and Rosier repeating his own words back at him verbatim—before Tom leaned back over the desk to grab his pen; the tips of his fingers brushing over Harry’s shoulders as he did so. With the pen in his hand, Tom spoke. “You will come, though, won’t you?” he murmured, never taking his eyes off the debate that was getting increasingly brutal, as though the examination of points of morality was merely a disguise for a vivisection of the pervading English law; Malfoy having sided with Mulciber on this particular issue and Rosier rapidly heading in the same direction, much to the chagrin of Lestrange. 

“I’m sure you don’t need me to be there to enjoy yourselves,” Harry said, directing a nod towards the party in front of them, though he turned his gaze to Tom and his angled silhouette cutting through the gentle light, just as those concrete monstrosities do in the city. 

“I’d still like it if you came,” Tom said, also turning to face him, his eyes catching the light as he did so and smouldering at the centre like bubbling sugar, “and you’ll indulge your favourite student, won’t you?”

“What makes you think you’re my favourite?”

This time, Tom smiled properly again and leaned over to Harry, his body cutting out all the thick beams of the sun from the room. “You do, professor,” Tom said, all soft and low so that Harry had to strain to hear him properly, though he _knew_ he was there. It was impossible to ignore the fact when he had the warm wetness of Tom’s mouth so close to his neck that there was this constant prickling down his spine like brambles were being dragged through his veins. “In fact,” Tom continued, “I would say that you’re fascinated by me…,” he paused to lick his lips and the sound was enough to tip Harry’s heart into such a rapid rhythm, he swore that it would beat its way out of his chest. “…Almost obsessed, wouldn’t you?” Tom said, the last syllable melting off his tongue and lying heavy at Harry’s ear because fascination was such a _forbidden_ thought to have.

But no sooner was Harry processing the sleekness of Tom’s suggestion, weighed down by its truth, and the richness of his tone that he could almost taste in the air around them, Tom was sitting back in his seat and watching the party again.

“He’s coming,” he said, loudly enough to interrupt the argument that had backed Lestrange into a corner, both physically and linguistically.

“What?” the other four said together, all of them turning away from the carnage of their conversation to face Tom and then turn to Harry. Their eyes all wide and blinking like this was the most exciting thing in the world and not something they had done nearly every month for the last six months.

“Yes. Fine,” Harry said, glancing over at Tom, his still heart humming in his throat and his pulse throbbing right in the centre of his tongue, “I’ll be there—but you all better be nice to me.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry goes to drinks with the group and gets more than he bargained for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh sheesh, this got long. Apologies for that.

Despite what people might say, there was a distinct difference between being invited to an event and actually turning up to it. The former required nothing more than a momentary slip of the tongue—the brief belief that your faults would be erased when the yellow lamps were turned on the and the rooms are swathed with shadows—whilst the latter required confidence and determination and no small amount of self-expression. To walk into a room, having been invited, necessitates you to prove your worth; to make yourself more interesting than you are and to give the hosts a reason to invite you back.

It was such qualities as those that Harry found himself lacking in. He could talk, just as any man with a tongue could, but the conversations that he could engage in were demarcated by monetary boundaries; for him, the size of an estate meant nothing, but to his moneyed contemporaries, the extent of your land and the dimensions of your property could be—and often were—correlated with your worth as an individual. 

Perhaps that was why Harry had accepted this invitation despite declining similar ones in the past, because _this_ invitation was extended by _Tom_. If it had just been Malfoy demanding that he made an appearance, and thus fulfilled his fantasy of having yet another man in his pocket, Harry would have been disinclined from attending and would have likely politely declined the summons. But this wasn’t an invitation from Malfoy, this was an invitation from Tom and, well, that was an entirely different matter. For Tom had this… way about him, that kept the discussions of money restrained to the periphery of conversation; he managed to navigate the inherent desire of capitalists to discuss their rich exploits and instead coax them into discussions of academia and knowledge, and to watch him do it was to see the world from the perspective outside of money. 

And that was undeniably a worthwhile endeavour after all, money and wealth could be forged or forgotten with seldom much difficulty, but good conversation was a rarity, perhaps even, the last true authenticity left in the world, and by that measurement of the worth of women and men, Tom was the rich man he would have been if the value was measured by the depth of a person’s pockets. 

However, there was still a nagging in the back of Harry’s head, like a swimmer caught in the tide it scrabbled on the walls of his skull leaving claw marks that he could not sponge from his consciousness. The intrinsic wrongness of allowing himself to lower his guard around mere students made apprehensions swell in his stomach, despite it not being legally or bureaucratically forbidden for him to do such a thing. Harry could easily name other professors who engaged, and even instigated, such arrangements, though their names felt sleazy and unclean in his mouth—the sort of things mumbled but never enunciated, and always accompanied by a wince at the silence that followed them. 

Then again, this was hardly the first time that Harry had had drinks with them, and the other encounters had all been perfectly pleasant and not the least bit scandalous. Academic talk followed by the faintest hints of politics and finished with a smidgen of personal narratives; the sort that inserts an air of informality and ease to the room. This time was different, though. Harry couldn’t quite explain why he felt it as he dressed for the evening, but he did; this overwhelming oddness in his skin, as though he were staring at himself for the first time and _really_ seeing who, and what, he was. 

A man wishing to be emulated even as he sought to emulate his students; a man waiting for something to happen that would mark his name into the history of this place, and prove to those that looked at him with disdainful eyes that _anyone_ could make it, even as he courted such history-making ideas with scepticism. At once he was a man who was both self-assured and self-doubting. Yearning to see them—to see _Tom_ —again and fearful that soon such yearning would spill beyond what was appropriate and he would be pushed away; fearful that Tom would recognise that the twitching of his heart was a product of more than what he was allowed to have—more than he was even allowed to want. 

Having pulled on his sweater, Harry stared in his mirror for far too long, just watching his reflection and listening to the ticking of the clock as it drew closer to the hour at which they had invited him down. Though he had no doubts that they were all already there. Malfoy was probably already on his second glass of wine and Rosier had probably hurt someone’s superficialities; Mulciber was probably rolling her eyes as she read that book she’d borrowed, and Lestrange was probably leaning back in his chair and laughing as he wound someone up. Tom would be there too, sitting and watching in his disconnected way as though he was a being that wasn’t quite of this world. Really, that was all that any of them were, smouldering creatures with bracken for tongues and lighter fluid for saliva, moving their mouths and burning through ideas because to have one, magnificent, idea was the first step towards living forever.

Without allowing himself time to change his mind, Harry left his room to go and find them—not that it was a difficult task, given they only ever went to one place when they wanted to hide from the eyes of gods and professors alike. 

The university was old—ancient by most accounts—and had a history that stretched too far back into the ethers of time for anyone to remember everything about it. There were records, of course, but many of them were lost now—to history or greed—and there were only be snippets of the story to be found pocketed away in books that were themselves articles of antiquity. But for the loss of the written account, there were still oral accounts: rumours of hidden rooms and suggestions of whole networks secreted behind the stairways and between the walls.

Their room was one of those spaces, buried in the undulating history of the place, only to be found by those who greatly desired to find it. The space, itself, had, at some point, been crudely—and probably drunkenly—dubbed the ‘Chamber of Secrets’ and the name had stuck, not that anyone could bring themselves to say that aloud. There was something childish and wonderous about that name, and indeed about a place that only _they_ could find, a place that was all but forgotten by time and space and the people who once cared for it. The only reason that they knew about it at all was because Malfoy and Tom had been undergraduates here before Harry was appointed, and Tom had a knack for wading through documents so old they weren’t even written in English, and Malfoy had a knack for missing lectures to go hunting for rooms that may or may not have existed. 

But regardless of how exactly they had located it, the pair of them had managed to find it and when they had arrived to be postgraduates nearly five years later, they had, naturally, sought to reassert their dominance of the space. Not that it had been in use; prior to his introduction to it three months ago, Harry had never so much heard a whisper of this one, and it wasn’t difficult to see why.

To get to it, you had to follow the main corridor to the Slytherin college common room, before stopping approximately twenty paces before the entrance, where there was an alcove about the height of the average man on either side of the corridor. These days, they served as shrines to the founder of the college—something that the Dean had put up on the nine hundredth anniversary of his death and no one had bothered to remove some three years later—but before that, they had been public bathrooms that had fallen into disuse and then disrepair. However, if you broke the door down, or as they did, kept a key that Mulciber had gotten hold of from—god knows—where, you would find the bathrooms still largely intact. 

Though it wasn’t the bathrooms themselves that was interesting; rather it was the false panel between the third and fourth sink, which, if removed, led you to a downward staircase which fed into a hollow that had been used during the war, when the university had briefly become the country’s communications hub, and so had a decent level of sanitation, ventilation and electricity. _That_ room, according to Tom, was still on the university records—buried somewhere in the archives room. But what was not on the records, was the room that led off from the main chamber—the one rumoured by people in the know to have been the private quarters of monarchs in exile and revolutionaries fleeing execution. 

It was a long room, walled with stone bricks; both ends held flat walls and the sides that connected them curved up into a high, arched, ceiling from which three glass-coated lights cast heavy shadows around the room. Over by the farthest wall were a collection of faded furniture, and at the nearest was an antique mirror that stretched nearly from the floor to the ceiling and whose frame was decorated with flowers interweaving themselves with snakes. For its location, it was surprisingly well lit and well ventilated and well heated, though the latter was Harry suspected was because it ran alongside the rest of the college’s heating system.

This group had not been the first to find it, even since the war and Harry doubted they would be the last to occupy it either; before them had been a myriad of students, each decorating the space to their specific tastes and filling it with increasingly beautiful but pointless articles. That was to say that over the years it had become quite furnished as students snuck more furniture down the passageways—the most impressive being a leather sofa and a velvet chaise, both of which must have been assembled down there because neither of them could have got down the stairs. 

Currently, there was also two more chairs, a low table, and an old pedestal desk—all arranged in a vague loop like the rings of Saturn—as well as a record player, several typewriters in varying states of disrepair, a chess set, a human skeleton strung up on a stand and rumoured to be a former professor, a bust of Aristotle with its head caved in (courtesy of Rosier), and a hideous quantity of books that students had been leaving behind, always with theirs names inscribed, since at least the sixteenth century, if not earlier. 

Some were on the shelves that surrounded the sofa, but the rest were stacked up high all around the room and there was something written on every topic conceivable, from natural science to law, to ancient languages and beyond, so many of which had passed out of the national consciousness. To be among them was the be among history and such a thing as that always sent a tingle down Harry’s spine; he had navigated through the maze of bureaucracy— _he had made it_ —and now he had entered the gleaming, artificial, world of academia.

As Harry expected they were already busy when he arrived; an empty bottle of wine on its side, against the legs of Malfoy’s chair with a few more, unopened bottles, standing neatly in a row on the floor beside it, and the sounds of discussions blooming through the air. Lestrange on one of the chairs and Mulciber opposite him on the chaise—all stretched out like a cat—while glaring and talking of the human weaknesses of god. Harry looked quickly away from that conversation and towards Malfoy, who was sitting at the desk pretending to be the judge, jury and executioner of the conversation, all whilst his legs were up on the desktop. Rosier was perched up beside his toes, nodding along to what he was saying whilst looking far more dignified, leaning back with her weight balanced on the palms of her hands as she swung her legs over the edge of the desk like a girl in love; for just a moment Harry was mesmerised by the motions of her feet knocking on the wooden drawers of the desk, the heels of her shoes clunking along to the clock.

Tom was alone on the sofa, positioned slightly to the left, as though he had intentions to share the space, the back of his head resting on the lip and his face pointed up to the lights, where a black moth skittered over the bulb. He was different from the rest of them, unbearably so—a lone entity that stood out against the dark leather and red cushions. However, that wasn’t the only reason he was different, Tom was also separated by the simple fact of his stillness; where the others swayed into each other like meadow grass, leaning into a communal space and laughing together, Tom was on the edge. Sitting there like the monuments that littered the grounds of the university, rising through the grass, tall and immovable, but at the same time cold—even lonely.

Harry had watched a hundred students touch at the monument out in the middle of the green. It was a large, grey, monolith that held no special status other than being as striking as it was stirring; scraping out emotions of defiance and boldness in even the timidest students. They touched it with the tips of their fingers as though it were something to be revered, and that was how people behaved around Tom too. Of all the students and even professors at the university, Harry had only seen these four, treat him remotely intimately; others looked on from afar, some in awe, others in disgust at the rough-edged plebeian who’d slithered into their institution. 

But perhaps the current difference between them and Tom was less philosophical and more social. After all, he was the only one not drinking, which was hardly a surprise given Tom didn’t drink alcohol, though the reasoning behind that decision was always different depending on who you asked. Malfoy claimed it was because Tom didn’t like the taste, while Lestrange swore it was because he was such an appalling lightweight, that, in his precise words, ‘would be on his knees after just three fingers of whisky;’ however, the reliability of that statement was questionable given that when he had shared it, Lestrange had been at a party, leaning rather heavily on Harry’s shoulder, telling him—barely coherently—how the monarchy was hiding the cure for vampirism. The only other reasoning was that given by Mulciber, who insisted it was because, in her words, Tom had a ‘pathological prerequisite for being in control of things,’ though even that didn’t entirely convince Harry. 

In all likelihood, the genuine reason was some unsightly combination of all three, but he wasn’t going to press it unnecessarily. Not when Tom was doing no harm, sipping at a cup of tea the colour of fresh copper and only occasionally raising his brow at everyone else’s drinking choices. 

Harry had been standing in the room for nearly a minute by the time they noticed him.  
“Well, look at that, I didn’t think you’d actually fucking come, sir,” said Lestrange, and he almost sounded disappointed enough to suggest he’d lost a wager placed on an underground betting ring that specialised in Harry’s doings—he would like to think that he was important enough for them all to follow his lifestyle with immense interest. Every word in every article he wrote, faithfully remembered and every action he committed, watched with intrigue, and mimicked to the edge of perfection, just as Harry had done with his own idols when he was young. After all, to be imitated is to know that you have become worthy of being art, and that was quite the thrill to have running under your skin. 

“Maybe I was persuaded,” Harry said, stepping further into the room and not missing the way that Lestrange languidly rolled his neck to look between Malfoy and Tom, considering which one it had been to convince him of the pressing need for his attendance, though the answer should have been obvious. Malfoy, for all his virtues, tended to compel, whereas Tom preferred persuasion; the difference between them was merely the matter of the force employed and the subtly with which the desired result was coaxed out. Compelling was heavy in force and low in subtly, like threatening your victim with the repossession of their house if they failed to comply, whilst persuasion was low on force and heavy in subtly, like a hundred subliminal whispers placed in ears until the only thought your ‘victim’ has is to agree with the result desired. 

“Or maybe,” Lestrange said, “you should just admit that you can’t stay away from us, can you, sir?”

“If that’s the case…,” Harry said, daring to take another step forward so that he was standing on the edge of their circle and the gravitational force of their presence was pulling at his heart and urging him closer like a carnivorous flower reeling in an insect to eat. “…I think you should admit that you can’t resist me either, can you?” 

“And why is that?” said Lestrange, dropping his half-hearted attempt at formality, and reclining back in the chair—the very image of decadent youth—his legs crossed over and the stem of his wine glass balanced between his fingers.

“Simple,” Harry said, now stepping over the threshold and into the circle, “you keep inviting me here.”

And it was true, this was easily his fourth invitation in the last eight months or so, and he knew that no other professor was permitted, or even _asked_ , down here to join them. That being said, this occasion felt undeniably different as something strung itself through the air and coiled into Harry’s lungs as he stood there as one of them. Perhaps it was merely because this had been the first time that _Tom_ had specifically invited him. The first time that he’d leant so close they’d almost touched, and the first time that he’d given Harry that sparkling smile and told him that he _wanted_ him to be there. Or, perhaps, it was just that _that_ was how Harry so desperately wished it to be. 

“Of course, we keep inviting you,” said Malfoy, having apparently realised he had arrived, and slinging his whole body over the side of his low-backed chair just to be able to see him. “You’re just _gorgeous_ to have around,” he said, the words spilling off his tongue with the jovial glow belonging to all people who’ve had just enough to drink that they can forget about their problems. 

But as Malfoy launched into an outburst concerning his latest personal tragedy, Harry was distracted by Tom. When he’d first spoken Tom hadn’t paid him any special attention, but now he was watching Harry intently, his eyes crawling agonisingly slowly up and over the length of Harry’s body, lingering a moment too long at the gold glint of his belt buckle, before sliding up to his throat where he paused and smiled that knowing smile of a man who has seen too much. Such a look made the strings that kept Harry together quiver and his heart ache with a want that just couldn’t be satisfied—all he could do was feed it with fleeting glances, not that they were always particularly fleeting. 

Even now, in front of everyone, Harry was staring back at Tom, every second finding more details to look at, more devasting things about him to notice and to want for himself—to have and covert at his own. The set of his brow, the line of his jaw, the bridge of his nose, and, if Harry dared to track his eyes lower, the stretch of Tom’s arms and the curl of his fingers and the spread of his legs. He swallowed. Without even trying, Tom was the image that statues were inspired by; the lingering words of a poet infatuated with their lovers’ image, carved into stone, and anyone who didn’t appreciate the salience of that, was a fool. 

Harry appreciated it as an unfaithful husband appreciates women—boldly and desperately, as though this would be his redeemer—his saviour—from the devastating need to be noticed and the crushing need to be loved. And Harry would be lying if he said he wasn’t _trying_ to get Tom’s subliminal attention; he’d just about subjugated his hair into the style that Tom had once murmured suited him—at dinner, between the entrée and the fish course—and he’d treasured that compliment as though it were a secret only for his ears. So too, had he forgone the tie because Tom’s eyes always fell to the hollow of his throat and Harry was all but addicted to the buzz of being looked at, especially by someone whose gaze was as valuable as Tom’s was. 

Tom was still gazing at him, though, to put it like that was to ignore the _intensity_ of that gaze, the tender hunger that clung to it and that Harry usually only saw when the male undergrads first caught sight of their female counterparts swimming in the lake and were frankly starstruck by the sight. But even that didn’t quite capture the… starving look in his eyes and the ravenous way his tongue slid over his lip like Harry was the tastiest thing he’d ever seen. 

Harry dipped his head and pretended to look at the floor. It wasn’t right to look at anyone like that or to be looked at like that, even if it made his skin prickle with want and his hands clench themselves into fists. When he chanced a glance back up, Tom had turned his head to listen to Malfoy and left the rest of himself exposed—vulnerable—to be looked at as Harry wished. 

He had changed for the evening—all of them had because they came from _those_ sorts of families, where _not_ changing for dinner was akin to the most sensational of scandals—and didn’t he look like a dream? His suit replaced with just slacks and a linen shirt that _clung_ to him in just the right way, and brought out the blue veins in his throat; Harry traced his eyes along one of them, following it from the line of Tom’s jaw, to curl down the side of his neck, before dipping beneath the crisp collar of his shirt. If this were a novel, or even a case written up by the Crown Court, he would walk right over there and have these emotions out in tirade that could rival any tempest—something brutal and violent that matched how tight these feelings had wound themselves around his heart. 

“So, Potter, you want a drink?” Malfoy said, having come to the end of this particular chronicle of his life story, and choosing—with almost deliberate precision—to interrupt Harry’s private fantasies of breezy confidence and requited attraction. 

“Just one, please.”

 _Just one glass_ —that was the rule—one glass of red and then he would go on his way back to his room; leaving the youth to their fresh, exciting, lives, filled with scandal and drama. Compared to them, he was old and fading and his presence for longer than he was invited, would wither the ideas and make the mood droop low like flowers in the rain. It was for the best that he merely satisfied their curiosity and played along to their tune for long enough to convince them of the value of emulating him, and then he would be gone—a mysterious professor lost to the winding corridors of the university. 

For now, though, he was here, standing by the desk and watching Malfoy unsteadily pour him a glass that would have been offensive to any waiter, both in its size and its technique. The glass itself was tall and heavy, and Malfoy filled it nearly to the brim with a rich red wine that should, apparently, have an edge of blackberry, and, he was politely informed by Mulciber—who proclaimed herself to be an expert on these things—notes of chocolate and heavy spice. It was a warm wine, comforting on the back of his throat, though after he had sipped at it, Harry swirled it and smelled it and pretended to be a connoisseur. 

Harry stood there for a moment, almost in the centre of the room but apart from the rest of them, waiting for that last collision that would bring them all fatally together. He stared awkwardly at his glass, watching the colours of the wine mix and merge with the shadows, and splay out to stain the floor with strands of crimson; it looked like a murder. A beautiful, beautiful murder. 

“Sit with me, professor,” Tom said, his voice cutting through the noise just as I had done earlier, ringing out decisive and confident; it sounded such an obscene suggestion that they should share a seat, that they should sit with their hands close enough to touch and yet stay so far apart. That there should be this, great, unbreachable wall between them, built with the bricks of occupation, and age, and sex, not a mere twelve inches of cold space. 

But if someone were to ask, Harry would say that he did not resent the pervading English morality, even if he did resent its codification into the law. He resented that this horrible—fascination, appreciation, adoration— _attraction_ he felt for Tom couldn’t be manifested in any way that England would understand, and thus he had to satisfy himself with longing stares and lingering hands disguised as professional courtesy. For the sake of other people’s moral sensibilities, he had to deny himself and the swelling feeling in his chest, the one that smouldered and ached at the mere sight of Tom sitting there and looking at him like _that_. 

The gaze was an indecent thing—at least inside his head—but so were Harry’s thoughts and the tiniest thing could start the most enormous illusion. The barest touch of his fingers became the grip of their hands together, and the slightest of smiles became Harry longing to know what the inside of Tom’s mouth tasted like; just the sight of him sitting there was enough for Harry to imagine—to _want_ —to kiss him up against the bare stone walls. Tom’s arms wrapping around his neck and pulling him closer, and Harry wouldn’t deny that he’d thought, in his murkiest most lewd moments, about getting to his knees and making Tom’s entire universe collapse in on itself as fast as a murder trial with a bribed jury. 

Harry shook his head, forcing the thoughts out before picking his way between the furniture to sit beside Tom. As he sat the sofa creaked under his weight, though it sounded to Harry’s ears more like a howl at the indignity of forcing those who could not touch to be so close to touching. 

“You came,” Tom said, leaning over so that Harry could hear him over the kerfuffle that had broken out between Malfoy and Mulciber over the correct quantity of wine that should be in a glass—Malfoy adamantly arguing that it should be filled to the rim whilst Mulciber insisted that it was improper to fill it more than half-way full. He turned back to Tom. 

“Well, I couldn’t deny my favourite student now, could I?” Harry said, watching in thrumming anticipation for Tom’s face to break into a smile; it did, and Tom ducked his head in mock modesty.

“So, I _am_ your favourite, then?”

“You always knew you were,” Harry said, daring to deepen his tone and lean in closer, taking a deep inhale of the attractive scent of Tom’s cologne as he did so, “you just wanted me to say it.”

The provocativeness of it got Tom’s attention and something in his gaze sharpened as a predator’s does when it spots its prey—his pupils focusing in on Harry, stretching out so wide like the endless flow of ink from a fountain pen.  
“For the second time today, I’d advise you to be careful, professor,” Tom said, shifting himself slightly so that the shadows dipped into the hollows of his face and turned his eyes entirely to black treacle, “or everyone will think you’re making insinuations about my character.”

“What if I am?” Harry replied, his tone softer than he intended, but it made Tom lean that bit closer just to hear him; the distance between them so little now that the heat of Tom’s skin was almost an unbearable irritation scratching against his own. He reached up to rub at his throat as if trying to scrape out the itch with the pads of his fingers. 

“Well then,” Tom said, “I would have to put an end to that, as Mulciber said, defamation is an unsightly business.”

“And how would you do it? Sue me?”

Tom smiled again. “Oh no,” he said, “I’d hate to be a burden on the legal system when there are other, _simpler_ , forms of redress.”

The way he said it made a chill curl up Harry’s spine and he pulled on the sleeves of his sweater as though that would warm the cavern that was opening up in the pit of his stomach. He would claim it was the nerves that made him take another generous mouthful of his wine and coat his tongue with a red film of false confidence.  
“And what redress did you have in mind, exactly?” he said, ignoring the impropriety that snaked between the words and turned the whole sentence the rosy pink colour of salacious undertones. And just knowing that those words had come from his mouth got Harry’s pulse thumping under his skin and his teeth digging into his tongue just to relieve the pressure from his heart. 

But Tom just turned his neck—the tendons caught the light and made Harry’s tongue throb and his mouth go dry—and leaned in close enough to graze his lips over Harry’s ear. “That’s easy, professor,” he murmured, “I would just prove to you what a… _good_ student I can be.”

Harry swallowed. Around him the world was fizzing and the only thing that he could see with any clarity was the pretty shapes that Tom’s mouth made. The mere sight of those sharp lines that formed Tom’s mouth, and the way they curved into a smile, accompanied the quick flickers of his tongue as it wetted his lips were enough to make Harry’s stomach clench around itself and his hands squeeze harder at the stem of his glass.  
“And how would you do that?” he said, trying to sound casual even as his voice trembled at the edges and his tongue would not stop _throbbing_ against the roof of his mouth. 

Before Tom could answer, they were distracted by Malfoy, ending the argument with a single word and hurled a new issue at them, trying to fuel the tinder and start an outrageous conversation.  
“Fuck Capitalism, that’s what I say,” he announced, as he waved his drink around, the wine slopping over the thin glass rim and splashing down on the desk, “I mean…,” he took another mouthful, “…what good did it do anyone anyway?”

Harry exhaled deeply as Tom slid away from him to a far more respectable distance. The rest of them looked at each other, their eyes knowing and their mouths holding back doubtful smiles. Mulciber, in her unending levelheadedness, was the one to break the silence. “I rather think,” she said, “that it brought you your affluence.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken,” Malfoy said, “none of it, is mine until my father dies—and he’s a _stubborn_ bastard.”

Harry had met the Malfoy senior just once, and that was merely in passing—an exchanged glance in the corridor as he had come to discuss his son’s education with the chancellor. But even that brief meeting was enough for Harry to have formed an unenthusiastic opinion of the man. Though he had the same physical countenance as his son, and that same steely, judgemental, gaze, there the similarities stopped. The Malfoy patriarch was a man who ran his family and his business with firm, proper, values and equally firm and proper discipline; the Malfoy son possessed neither of those qualities nor were they likely to be developed in the near future. He was also old enough to know there was little his father could, ultimately, do to prevent him from inheriting everything eventually—that was, except refusing to die, apparently. 

“Have you contemplated patricide?” Mulciber said, ever so casually whilst sipping at her wine as though everyone had considered killing their father. Perhaps they had. If Harry had had a father, he might have done as well, but as it stood, that was nothing more than an abstract concept. Even so, there was something undeniably profound in the act of killing the human who had made you; the man who guided you and shaped you into the person you were today, but at the same time, it lacked the inherent horror of killing the human—the woman—who had birthed you. Harry imagined that it must be quite freeing, in a way, especially if you were one them: rich, young things with collars around their necks, dying for the chance to shake off the last attachments between themselves and the past and to be reborn as someone new.

“Patricide?” Malfoy said, “there’s an idea.” He paused to take another gulp and put his glass down on the desk with a satisfying clunk, “I can’t deny, I want to throttle him sometimes.” The emphasis that he put on that hateful word made it sound nearly romantic and Harry could almost picture the scene of Malfoy with those delicate little fingers of his, clenched white around his father’s neck, wringing out every slight sound from his throat and every drop of oxygen from his lungs until he was nothing more than a body in a chair. 

But if that was what Harry was thinking of, it wasn’t what Malfoy was considering; he was too busy watching Tom and holding his gaze a little too long; Harry followed his eyes and turned to look at Tom too. He was sitting perfectly still on the other side of the sofa, well, apart from his hands that were twitching against the leather seat, his fingers flexing and his knuckles cracking. For an almost imperceptible moment, there was an expression Harry had never seen before flickering over his features, something dark and volatile like the sea swelling into a vortex, as though Tom was intimately acquainted with the act of throttling.

“You _do_ know how long it takes to kill someone like that, don’t you?” Tom said, though he had shaken the darkness from his features and the statement was simply that, a statement of scientific nature—the simple, well-known, assertion of how long it took to kill a man and how ill-equipped Malfoy was for that task. After all, there was no denying that Malfoy was soft in almost every meaning of the word; the embodiment of the idle rich with his smooth hands and plush thighs and indulgent habits because unlike a minority of other students, and unlike Tom, and unlike Harry, he hadn’t had to drag himself out of the gutter to get here. He was simply here, wasting his time on his family’s money and enjoying every minute of it; it was not a matter of life and death, only pleasure. 

But, far from making him drop the point, Tom’s comment only made Malfoy’s gaze harden, and, for just a moment, Harry saw Malfoy’s so-hated father in that look.  
“You underestimate how much I want him dead,” he said, before sliding his eyes off Tom and, instead, pointed his face up to the ceiling, revealing to the eyes of God and anyone else who would watch, the bitterness eating at his soul—that inexplicable loathing for the man who comes to represent all the most hated parts of yourself. 

“Actually, no,” said Rosier, sipping at her drink and looking directly at Malfoy as she spoke, “I think you’re rather overestimating your perseverance, Malfoy, not to mention your strength,” she continued, “you couldn’t even beat Mulciber at arm wrestling and she’s tiny.” Rosier laughed, perhaps at the memory, perhaps at man’s insufficient strength for his violence, and no one sought to challenge her on her own might, after all, they knew the stuffed animals that Rosier had in her room— testimonials to her selective savagery. 

Malfoy just made a face at her. “Fuck you,” he said, placating himself with another drink.

“I’d favour a hunting accident,” said Mulciber, piping up from the corner; out of all of them she had the most excuse to hate her father, a man who had made it no secret he’d have preferred a boy and who had gone as far to name his daughter after himself just as you might with your firstborn son. It was the reason that all the ladies here looked at her with pity and offered her trinkets of womanhood denied to her at home. “After all,” she continued unperturbed, “death is a huntsman’s perpetual acquaintance.”

“But then there’s no satisfaction in it,” Tom said, shifting back in his seat and a fraction closer to Harry, as he took a sip of his tea, “and surely,” he continued, placing the cup back down, “you kill your father to feel the moment he takes his last breath?”

There was a carefully crafted brutality behind that sentence, something savage that Harry usually only got to see when he coaxed it out of Tom inch by inch. It made his spine tingle to so freely hear the thoughts that he took an age to unreel from Tom’s mouth because he was reluctant to say a lot of what he thought—that was obvious to anyone who took the time to listen to him. Most of the time, everything Tom said was so perfectly crafted to suit the mood and the tone and the dignity of the conversation that there were, by necessity, a hundred indecent thoughts that never left the ridges of his tongue. 

Harry would be lying if he said he didn’t want to hear them; any words that Tom had to say were words that he was dying to hear. 

“Such savagery might suit someone like you,” she said coldly, “but I would forgo the satisfaction to evade incarceration…” she paused, to take a long, deep, drink from her glass, “…even if it were to make my heart ache with unfulfilled desires.”

“Someone like me?” Tom said, his tone staying light and the beginning of a smile forming at the corner—Mulciber amused him and perhaps to go further, this conversation _amused_ him. Intentionally or not, Mulciber drew out the tantalising creature that Tom kept under his skin; drew it out and fed it.

“You know what I mean, Riddle,” she said, tilting her head to the side and stretching out further, her toes curling up under her stockings and scratching softly on the green velvet of the chaise, “someone…like…you.”

“Should I be insulted by such allusions?”

“Only if you want to be.”

Tom shrugged. “I’m not in the mood today,” he said, glancing at Harry, his eyes slithering over him before he leaned forward to place his teacup down in the low table. As he did so, the very tips of his fingers brushed over Harry’s knee and made him tense, his toes curling like Mulciber’s, but for an entirely different reason. “After all,” Tom said, still looking at Harry and his hand still in a place that it shouldn’t be, “we have company.”

“Company shouldn’t prevent good conversation,” said Lestrange, “in fact…” 

Harry didn’t hear the rest of what Lestrange had to say because his entire self was far too focussed on deconstructing the sound the sofa made when Tom leaned back into it; that soft, silky, sliding of linen over leather, and the sticky sound of hot skin peeling off the seat. Harry clenched his hand again and willed himself to think of anything other than the weight of Tom pushing down into the seat and what that weight would feel like if it were on top of him instead. Would the pads of Tom’s fingers sound as sticky unpeeling from his skin? And would every shift be so painful on his ears if Tom was shifting over his lap?

It was half-way through the musing—the fantasy—that someone, maybe Rosier, handed him another glass. A replacement for the empty one in his hand. this new one was less full and white instead of red; crisp on his tongue—sweet and fruity—it tasted of honey and something light that Harry couldn’t place. 

“…Of course, it’s the natural order of things,” Lestrange was saying, when he tuned back into the conversation, “to have those above and those below, isn’t that right, Riddle?” he said; all at once sounding like he expected an unconditional agreement and an argument. 

Apparently, Tom had been following the transition of ideas because he didn’t even hesitate to collect his thoughts. “It’s the natural to have shepherds and their sheep,” he said, “but you rather imply a divide defined more by social stratifications than by individuals.” He paused just to look at Lestrange, to hold his gaze and, had it been anyone else, make them squirm. “As though,” he continued, “you think there should be a class to lead and a class to follow.”

“Obviously that’s what I think,” Lestrange said, “because that’s the way it should be—the class above and the class below—why would any good, self-respecting person want to mix them together and associate with the—well, the likes of them?” He took a gulp of his drink, “I mean, it’s frankly offensive to think that we would”

“Apologies,” said Tom coolly, “I would hate to offend you and your delicate susceptibilities, but I must nonetheless ask, is the professor here offensive to your good taste?” he said, “and, subsequently, am _I_ offensive to it?” His tone had dipped again and was cold and hard, as though hidden beneath all the sweetness that Tom wore like a sugar cage there was a permanent coldness stretched over his heart.

For a moment, Lestrange recoiled as a cat does when it is sprayed with water, but he gathered himself, and his points, quickly enough—clearly not ready to back down from this argument, and who could blame him? In Harry’s experience those affluent, influential people were the ones to cling to materiality longer and harder than anyone else; the ones who screamed and howled at the slightest possession being taken from them, even when they had the audacity to take such things from others.  
“You’re different,” he said casually as he sat back, his spine stuck straight to the chair, and sipped at his wine, “you’re not like _them_ , Riddle, and you shouldn’t compare yourself.” 

“Why not?” Tom said, the chill still running fresh through his tone, “what makes _them_ so different from me?”

“Oh come off it,” Lestrange said, “they’re fucking uncouth,” he continued, sitting forward now, both elbows making dents in his thighs and his wineglass being passed between his hands, “and you’re… well, you’re _dignified_ —there’s hardly a comparison to be made.”

“I think there is,” Tom said, a brittleness now in his voice—sharp and metallic—like the clang of a fork. “Obviously, I won’t deny,” he continued, “the need to have _someone_ above and others below, but I will deny your assumption that those above must always look like you, and act like you, and be like you—talent has more skins than you have suits, and it would be unwise for you to forget that.”

Lestrange laughed, more with disbelief than amusement. “So, you’re saying, I should just mindlessly listen to some fucking little upstart who thinks he’s clever?” he said, “is that right?”

“That’s what I said.”

Lestrange laughed again and looked towards the others, though none of them gave him the satisfaction of a glance in his direction, much less a public agreement with his flawed ideology. “And, pray tell, Riddle,” he said, turning back to Tom, “why the fuck would I do that?”

“Because they have to listen to fools like you, who think they are far more special than they really are—so it’s just common decency.” As he spoke, Tom didn’t lean forward, nor did he snap or raise his voice; he simply held Lestrange’s eyes and let the words speak for themselves. 

Had it been the classroom, Harry might have intervened to prevent harsh words from being spoken, but, as it was, he said nothing. Preferring instead to press himself back further into the chair and drink and mull over the differences between Lestrange and Tom that had first glance were merely cracks, but on closer examination, more accurately resembled chasms. One with a sharp smile and more money to his name than he could possibly hope to spend even if he lived for a millennium, and the other with a serrated smile and nothing more. 

Watching them now, Harry had to wonder what would have happened had their places been reversed, would they still speak of politics in the same tones? Was altruism an innate trait or did it have to be earned through destitution and suffering; did money penetrate so deeply into the soul that it corrupted everything it touched like a rot? Or was, perhaps, morality entirely unconnected from wealth and from privilege, and, if that was the case, did it mean the moral rot that spread like mycelium, stretching its spores into every facet of public life, did so simply because it was glamorous and intoxicating, and served as a thick screen to conceal the vapidity of human life?

Harry blinked and tuned back into the conversation or, rather lack-of conversation. Lestrange’s mouth was twisting in that unpleasant way that afflicts the educated when they are proved wrong with common-sense as opposed to academic arguments, whilst Tom sat still on the sofa, a smile glimmering over his lips and his gaze drifting back to Harry. Like he wanted approval—a reward—for what he’d done. It didn’t help to lessen the tautness in the air, that tell-tale quietness of a brewing dispute, but before it was allowed to come to swell, it was broken apart by Malfoy, who utterly refused to be dragged into political conversations unless they were specifically about him, and who seemed to have recovered from his earlier personal humiliation. 

“Look,” he said, “you’re both right.” 

The other turned to him, Tom with his eyebrows raised and Lestrange with his signature glare impressed into his features. “How?” they said in unison.

“ _Because_ ,” Malfoy said like it was obvious, “clearly Lestrange is a fucking fool to think something so convoluted can be explained away in half a bloody sentence…” He paused to stare properly and disapprovingly at Lestrange, before directing his gaze back at Tom. “…but you, you Riddle, can’t deny, that you were a proper, and might I add insufferable, little upstart when I first met you.”

Tom smiled at him, all warm and genuine, “and look at where that got me.”

“In decent company, thank goodness,” said Rosier, before launching into a tirade against the indecency of company these days; the fools and the oafs that called themselves intellectuals without even knowing the definition of the word. And with that, the matter was over and the disagreement forgot—mere words spoken that meant nothing. But for all the value of Rosier’s words, Harry just let them wash over him, soft and soothing on his ear even as the topic began to slide away from those uncivilized individuals and towards the pillars of culture that must define any decent person’s education. 

Harry leaned forward in the guise of placing his near-empty glass down, and when he sat back, he turned to Tom; his lips burning with anticipation. “I didn’t know,” he began, “that you were so interested in the implications of social class.”

“Well, your paper was very influential,” Tom said, still paying attention to whatever it was that Rosier was saying; though Harry had long stopped listening he glanced towards her bright smile and exaggerated gestures as she leaned dangerously back on the desk. In fact, the only thing he could hear beyond the beating of his own heart and the, soft, steady breathing of Tom, was the echo of Tom’s voice making a coherent case against the disregard that those above had for those below and the determination that, when someone like them had made it, it was because they were different—they were the special exception. 

“Wait? My—my paper?” Harry said, finally registering what Tom had just said.

Tom turned to him now, the corner light catching the edge of his cheek and gold specks blooming in its wake and, despite the inappropriateness of the moment, Harry was struck with the sight; the simple exquisiteness of a man wrapped up in the folds of the evening but who looked like the first streaks of dawn.  
“Yes, professor,” Tom said as he rested the side of his head into the back of the sofa and watched Harry eyes with all the authenticity in the world, “your paper on the elite social stratification of England and how it manipulates the public perception of the lowest classes,” he said, “reading it, was what made me want to study under you.”

Harry swallowed, a lump swelling deep in his throat; it was like a dream to be told that, to have yourself confirmed as a student’s catalyst into academia, and not just _any_ student. Tom. _He_ was the reason that Tom had fallen into a besotted relationship with academia and, to go even further, _he_ was the reason that Tom was even here. And perhaps this was the divine confirmation that Harry had been waiting for that proved they were pre-ordained to collide; that their lives—and, dare Harry think, their hearts—had always been interwoven. 

With the thought of such a purpose humming in his mind, Harry continued to listen to the swirling of the conversation—the way that it rolled and drifted much like the sea between topics—someone refilled his glass again, once again with a rich red, and Harry sipped at it without thinking; swallowing down another mouthful like it was his first because he was surrounded by genuine intellectuals, tipsy on their favourite wine and talking about scholarship as though learning was the one true prerequisite to consecration. Beside him, Tom was motionless, his head still resting on the lip of the chair and if Harry looked in the mirror across the room, he could see the gentle curve of his throat standing out so stark and pretty—the very definition of unattainable yearning—that Harry just wanted to _touch_.

After all, being able to see such a thing but not touch it, made an ache curl upward in Harry’s stomach, winding itself through his blood vessels and stretching him out to a hollow shell of his former self. It was as though there was an electrical current prickly at his skin from the insider and making him squirm as a familiar tingle coil up the length of his spine, sliding between the bones until even sitting still was an effort. Harry just wanted to move, to shift indecently close to Tom and take his hand in his and perhaps even kiss it—press his lips over each of the bones in Tom’s knuckles and up the length of his fingers just as worshippers do to the icons of their gods. Without thinking, he shifted over to make their shoulders graze together. 

Between Harry’s thoughts, people moved and repositioned, orders were changed, debates were started and ended and rekindled immediately before being extinguished by a final, cutting, remark sliced off the tip of someone’s tongue. And all the time beside him was the inextinguishable warmth of another human being’s—Tom’s—body; their shoulders now pressed together and just a sliver of space between their thighs, it was a murky space and though Harry longed to close it up and have their thighs touch, he dared not allow himself to do that. After all, in this moment there was, once again, an intense sense of belonging threading itself through Harry’s; _this_ was where he was supposed to be, drinking wine with youth and talent and almost believing that those traits were in his reach again, and he could not ruin it now. 

“When was the last time you kissed someone, Potter?” Rosier said, bursting the bubble of his thoughts and forcing him to look away from the endless unknown space between his thigh and Tom’s, and up towards her. She had moved to sit in the chair to his left, her legs crossed over each other, her shoes discarded on the floor below her and her fingers wrapped around a half-full glass of white wine. “So?” she said, stringing out the syllables until they were spun around his head. 

“Too long ago,” Harry said, the words spilling out of his mouth before he had a chance to think about them properly; though, it _had_ been too long. Ginny Weasley was the last person he’d kissed _and_ the last person he’d loved, but even she had been years ago now—a faded passion confined to the locked box of his heart. Not that Harry couldn’t remember every detail about her, from her favourite tea to her favourite restaurant; the blouses she wore on her afternoons off and the rough scent of her perfume against his neck. 

“Was she pretty?—I bet she was pretty,” Rosier continued, shifting on her seat and wiggling her toes if only to catch Harry’s attention. She got it too, but only because she looked like someone else. Her feet hitting the leg of the chair in just the same way that Tom’s did when he was bored and wanting attention—perhaps it was an idiosyncrasy that all unstimulated intellectuals possessed, or perhaps it was a trait picked up by familiarity—Harry had come to respond to the sound as a dog responds to a dinner bell, always looking up with his ears pricked, waiting for the next string of conversation to take him somewhere shocking. 

“So, Potter?” Rosier prompted again, “was she pretty?” 

Harry took another gulp of his wine. “She was to me,” he said. 

“Of course—but was she prettier than me?” she asked, “prettier than Riddle?” The question stung his heart and, despite surely being rhetorical, Harry could not help the comparisons forming in the back of his head. The physical being of Ginny balanced and judged against the physical being of Tom; the marauding sparkle in her eyes contrasted with the predacious glimmer in his. In silence, he compared their traits and found Ginny wanting in most of them. She might have defined his past and though her presence and indeed his loss of her haunted Harry, it no longer defined him—now, it was authentic academic debates at sun-soaked desks and lingering gazes across the room that defined his life. Tom was everything that he had come to live for, and Harry was in so deep he couldn’t be sure that the next step wouldn’t be the one that drowned him. 

“And no one since?” Rosier asked, though her usual mocking tone had dissolved with the wine and now she only sounded sad and it pulled at Harry’s heart. He shook her head if only to please her.  
“You know, Potter,” she continued, leaning towards him, “I bet you’ve spent so long buried in your books that you’ve forgotten how to kiss,” she said and there was a challenge to her words as though she expected him to prove his proficiency to her post-haste. 

Maybe it was that insidious insinuation that has Harry glancing at her lips; they were curved and pretty and painted red, but they weren’t what his heart longed for, and, without thinking of the implications, Harry turned his head towards Tom again. He was still there beside him, the monument to all Harry’s unspoken desires, and, despite the wrongness of it all, he couldn’t stop himself staring at the lines of Tom’s lips, as though they were the first strokes of the pen that wrote the Magna Carta and every statute since. 

Either way, Harry still heard himself reply with the same distant tone imbued with a false confidence. “That’s a bold suggestion.”

“Well,” Rosier said, “no one got anywhere by being coy, did they?” As she spoke, she got up from her chair and sat beside him on the sofa so that Harry was ensnared between her and Tom like a rabbit backed into a corner by two foxes. They made quite the picture in the mirror; the two of them with their carefully folded limbs—prim and proper—and him with his sagging shoulders and spread legs, his glass balanced on his knee. 

“Still,” he said, swallowing hard, “it might give a man… ideas.”

One of them leaned over, blocking out the light as they reached to take Harry’s wineglass from his hands—the liquid staying smooth and glassy, and those hands looking so nice. Strong fingers wrapped so elegantly around the stem, that Harry found himself staring at those hands; the gentle curve of the nails and the spikes of the knuckles leading down to delicate wrist that Harry faintly remembered seeing upturned somewhere with a pen falling out of the palm. But, before he could place the memory, they both had their mouths against each one of his ears and were murmuring, the sound of their voices like the roll of the waves against the shore. 

“But aren’t ideas the foundations of society?” said the voice from one side, and Harry should really have been able to tell who it was, but the whole world seemed to be folding in on itself—blurring in and out of focus. “And so,” said the voice from the other side, “shouldn’t we cultivate them at all costs?”

Harry closed his eyes and leant back, his head resting on the lip of the sofa. “And how—how do you cultivate an idea?” he said softly and behind the shielding darkness of his closed lids; the comforting black that disguised just how wrong it was for him to be here, in this room, engaging in these sorts of conversations. The sort that was tantalising and intoxicating and tingled on the tip of his tongue; the sort that made Harry feel young and wild, uncaged from the hindrances of his profession and personality. 

“You cultivate an idea,” a distinctly _masculine_ voice murmured, “by _submitting_ to it,” he said, emphasising the syllables enough to make Harry want to slide to his knees right there; to press his cheek against whoever’s knee that voice belonged to and show them just how willing he was to yield to something so profound as an idea. 

But, as it was, Harry swallowed, the slightest buzzing of apprehension gaining traction in his skull—this conversation was going to places he’d never dared to go before, the furtive locations of those who spoke of higher things; those who flirted with indecency and always came out unscathed—Harry never came out of anything unscathed. 

“Won’t it devour me?” he said, not quite wanting to open his eyes for fear of seeing exactly where he was; huddled underground, away from prying eyes with the five students, who talked of patricide and kissing as though they were complementary ideals. As though love was a conditional thing that was so painfully dependent on the whims of others forever swimming in your favour, as though they would be moved to decide your fate as easily as you are enchanted or pricked by a rose’s thorns. 

“Don’t you want it to, professor?”

He didn’t quite remember the moment in between hearing those words and feeling the brush of someone’s shirt against his fingertips. His nails scratching at the material as he hooked his fingers into the split at the top and pulled the body closer to him. It didn’t matter that the room was uncomfortably warm or that there were four pairs of eyes watching him; the only thing that mattered was the softness of someone’s mouth against his, and the warmth of their lips, and the heat of their tongue. The universe was shrunk down to this moment—to just the feeling of the sofa on his back, the contours of a face against his palms and the taste of someone else was bleeding out, spreading over his tongue like a membrane and swallowing him up. 

Was this what it was to drown? To feel your lungs filling up with water and choking you from the inside out—was this what it was to die? Except, Harry wasn’t dying, he was being reborn. The feeling of someone’s mouth against his own was invigorating and he could feel the newness and vigour that age had stolen from him—that thrill for life and the need to drink it up, as though every day was the final one that you would live before committing the hideous offence of getting old—return. 

Around him, there was a jolting chorus of noise, the air heavy with juvenile whoops and cheers usually reserved for the most salacious occurrences. Amongst the jittering and the hollers of excited youth, Harry heard the distinctive clipped notes of Malfoy’s increasingly preposterous accent and the light laughter of Rosier right beside him. Pulling back, just a fraction as he inhaled and tried to clear his head, he could see Mulciber still stretched lazily across the chaise, her image blurring with the stack of books behind her as she continued to sip at her drink, and as Harry followed the line of legs, he met the gaze of Lestrange, leaning back at the end of the seat with Mulciber’s feet in his lap, which could only mean… Harry blinked, long and hard—his head turning over and over itself as he attempted to focus on exactly whose face he was holding with both hands. 

Tom’s. 

It was Tom Riddle’s face he had between his palms, and so it must logically follow, even to his wriggling mind, that the taste on his lips must be Tom’s too. That was not good. And somewhere in the back of his head, the alarm bell was bawling at him to stop, but Harry would have been lying is he said he’d never wanted to kiss Tom. Ever since he’d met him, a small, hidden, part of him had wanted to hold Tom’s pretty face in both hands and kiss him until the world around them softened and all the colour began to drip down the walls. 

It was an undeniably wrong thing to have wanted, but now that he’d done it, the world didn’t feel monumentally changed, and there was no sudden, painful, conclusion to his longing or cosmic judgement for his craving. The planet was still spinning around and around, and Tom hadn’t shoved him away in disgust of what he was. 

All Tom did was curve his back and shift closer, moving his hand as he did so from the space between their legs to rest on Harry’s thigh—it burned, a brand on his skin to mark the moment when he’d given in to temptation— _submitted_ to the idea of living forever in someone else’s heart.  
“So, tell me, professor,” Tom murmured, his spine twisted awkwardly just so he could get close enough for the weight of his words to rest on Harry’s lips, “do you want to be devoured?” 

“Only if it’s by you,” Harry said, so quiet that it was scarcely above a whisper, though the weight of the words made his tongue limp in his mouth and his heart burn in his chest. For a moment there was nothing in the world around them besides those words, no before and no after, just the hollowed space of the present where Harry could pull Tom’s face towards his again—a white face framed by brown hands—and hold him close enough to taste the air he breathed. 

All at once, Tom was clear and clouded, his edges blurred out, but the brightness of his eyes inimitable; the very image of compulsion that had been painted in every forbidden dream that Harry had ever had. Just looking at him made the inside of his mouth hot and his hands itch—scratching right under the skin as though even his bones understood how horrifying this feeling—this love—was. Harry had never pictured the loss of his heart like this, he had thought that maybe he would lose it to a woman with kind eyes and firm hands and that they would live a quiet life together by the sea, he would teach and she would write, maybe they would even have had a child and people would look at them and think they had it all. 

But instead, he was here, sitting between hollow lights in the bowels of an institution, savouring the taste of sweet honey tea on his student’s lips and feeling his heart shred itself to pieces between his ribs. He was no more than a man; no more than blood and flesh and maybe that was why his pulse was pounding on his tongue and in his throat with such a force that it might just tear through his skin. No one told you how brutal it was to have someone take your heart from you—how savage—it was to feel their fingers prizing open the most intimate space you have and winding their hands around your heart and taking it for themselves. Nor did they tell you just how empty it was in the hollow of your chest when it had gone. 

“God,” Harry heard himself say through the fog of thoughts and the haze of the shadows blurring up the walls; using the Lord’s name because there wasn’t anything else quite as profound as the name of a god to describe a mere man. “God, Tom, I think I… I want…” But he couldn’t finish a thing for the words just stuck to his tongue and melded themselves to the inside of his mouth. 

“What do you want?” Tom murmured as his hand clenched and Harry felt the burning marks of another man’s fingers imprint themselves into his thigh. It was gorgeous. To be wanted, to be had, to be marked as the stars mark the sky, the light burning up in the darkness from a million miles away. 

“I want _you_ ,” Harry said, the confession so quiet on his lips and yet so loud in his head, “more than anything I… I want to hold you, I want to touch you, I want to taste you,” he continued, the words coming quicker than he could speak them, “I want to know that you’re real and that… that you’re something I can have a piece of.”

He felt rather than saw Tom’s smile against the corner of his mouth and the edges of his teeth grazing over Harry’s lips. “Oh, you can have as many pieces of me as you want, professor,” he said, still soft and silky like every syllable was smothered in velvet. Though as soon as he said it, Tom was pulling away, dragging himself from Harry’s lips as the sun drags itself from the sky, but going slow enough that Harry found himself chasing the warm surety of a mouth that seemed to want to same indecent things that he did. A mouth that wanted to share the secrets of an appalling attraction.

With his spare hand, Tom touched Harry’s face, tracing his thumb down the contours of human skin to reach his lips, and then lower still to touch at his chin and the top of his throat.  
“I’d have thought you would know by now,” he murmured, “that my heart is yours to sculpt—yours to tear apart and cram into the crevices of yourself.” He tracked his thumb down to the crest of Harry’s throat and then even further to the illicit space where Harry’s shirt parted, and a thick slice of skin was painted with burnished gold. Harry swallowed—too transfixed by the sumptuous colour of Tom’s eyes as they glistened when he pulled back the loose collar of his white shirt, to do anything more than listen. 

“Just as I know,” Tom continued in the same, slow, pace, that was paralleled by the insistent press of his finger, “that you’re mine to devour as I please,” he said, “mine to consume.” By now, the words were blurring between their lips and the low hum of silences that spread through the room. Around them, there was no shuffling of feet or squirming of bodies, there was just the two of them crammed into a tiny universe where other people did not matter, and where the world was always still.  
“And you know what I want, professor?” Tom said, “I want to take you apart; I want to open you up and string you out—unravel you thread by thread and wind you back around my fingers.”

There was such care to that confession, such _sincerity_ that Harry’s heart swelled fuller, daring to swallow up his lungs and drown him in his helpless love. But so too was there was a savagery to that admission; a barbarity that Harry had never been properly introduced to, but seemed to simmer under Tom’s skin, and it could not be left there, perceived and yet unspoken. Not when it was filled with such a need—such an unslakable hunger—to comprehend the patterns of another person’s blood vessels and to learn how to lace yourself inside them.

“You want to tear me apart?” 

“Unravel you, professor,” Tom corrected, “undo you and unpick you until I know what’s right at the centre of your heart.”

Harry kissed him again. Hard and raring—nearly desperate—even as he tried to go slow; tried to savour the moment and taste every inch of Tom’s tongue so that he would never forget how it felt to have him between his teeth. And maybe it was the wine, but Tom’s skin was the softest thing Harry had ever touched and he couldn’t help but run the tips of his fingers over his cheek and his throat and down in the space between the nape of his neck and his collar. He gripped at it with hot fingers, wanting hopelessly—desperately—to hold Tom closer. To pull him into his skin and nestle him between his ribs because that was warm and soft and safe, and now that they had kissed, Harry couldn’t bear to let him go. 

It was with that thought in mind that he dragged Tom towards him by the collar of his shirt, pulling and pulling so weakly on his shirt until Tom relented and turned his body and followed Harry’s coaxing to spread his thighs wide over Harry’s lap. Like that, Harry could feel the weight of him, the solidity of the man who was surely made of dreams, except Tom was real and he was here with his fingers threading through the curls of Harry’s hair and his teeth catching on the tip of Harry’s tongue. 

“Enjoying yourself, Potter?”

The interruption made Harry surface and gulp at the air—the world spinning violently back into focus—and he was aware again of Rosier sitting so close to him; the warmth of her skin eating into his and the corners of her smile cutting through the moment because she had seen. They _all_ had _seen_ him take Tom’s face between his palms and kiss him like the man starved of tender affection that he had become. For one crude moment of satisfaction, he had torn apart a year’s worth of yearning and wanting and dreaming and given in to an irredeemable weakness. 

_What had he done?_

The realisation was cold in his lungs and he went to push Tom off of him and maybe stumble out of here with still a quarter of the dignity that he came in with, but before could, Rosier pressed her hand to his shoulder—her nails stuck hard into the bone and stinging at his skin—keeping him unmoved on the sofa.  
“If I were you,” she said softly, “I’d fret, less for our opinions, and more for your throat—Riddle, here, has a thing for throats—likes wrapping his hands around them, don’t you?” she turned her head to look at Tom, a wicked smile pulling at the corner of her mouth, as though there were unspoken secrets in the air and she wanted everyone to know that she knew what they were. 

Tom was flush against him, both of his hands hooked around the back of Harry’s neck—grounding him to the leather. He could feel the soft press of Tom’s fingertips smoothing over his skin, accompanied by the gentle scratching of his nails, all encouraging Harry to let go of everything; to forget how awful this was—how indecently _wrong_ it was—because it _was_ awful and wrong and appalling, he just didn’t want to admit it. 

“Is this what you needed, professor?” Tom murmured, speaking in the hollow tones of helpless man as his fingers mirroring the movement of Harry’s and dipping just below the collar of his shirt, to that hidden part of your skin that was far too intimate to be found in acts of friendship. As he spoke, he pressed his forehead into the crook of Harry’s neck and tilted his head a little to the right to mouth softly at Harry’s neck like a baby trying to suckle. “Is this what you dreamt of?”

The question was inadequate; this was more than he could have ever dreamed of. The person that he was, the simple life that he had built for himself, could never compete with the lustrous visions that this moment had presented him with. Their bodies were too beautiful and their brains too bejewelled and yet, Harry was a part of them, connected through a strange academic myth of equality. So, there were no answers on Harry’s tongue, but as Tom pressed himself further against him, his thumb lying on Harry’s pulse point and his palms hot on his neck, Harry was quite sure he didn’t need one because Tom already knew what it meant to be able to curl up in someone else’s arms. 

All he needed to do was stay here in the stillness and stare across the room to the mirror on the opposite wall; his reflection splayed out, stretched, just to show off every misdeed he had committed in hyper-definition. He could see the others too—see them and feel them; the warmth of their skin, the depth of their breathing, the buzzing of their brains playing an alcohol-tinged static. They had moved from their seats, crawling like beasts on the ground to sit beside him; Rosier on his left with her shoulder pressed into his, Malfoy on his right with his hand clutching at the crease of Harry’s thigh, Mulciber at his feet, her head resting against his knee and Lestrange squeezed behind the sofa, his hands easing up the back of Harry’s neck and into his hair. 

And still, they swayed; undulating beneath the lights, their hands pressing and squeezing at his skin, though like worker bees they obeyed their queen and those fingers never wandered, or drifted, or strayed to inappropriate territory. They merely touched, as though touching was something sacred, something _holy_ to only be enjoyed by the privileged few. Harry certainly felt divine under the pressure of too warm fingers curling themselves into all the cracks and flaws of his body and smoothing over them like they were not imperfections at all. 

Like that, the image they cast was one of a renaissance painting, the eye centred on Harry’s face as he stared back at himself in the mirror and wondered how they got here; when did he become the altar where offerings of wine and intellectual conversations were left? And when did he become the god that these brilliant creatures sacrificed themselves to? To get this far so soon must mean they had been sliding towards this moment since they had first met; every action and every discussion a single brushstroke in the painting of this picture, and, at this, precise, second, Harry wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
